Wednesday, June 01, 2016

My war with Uncharted4...

Seeing as I have no job right now and not much hope of finding one in the immediate future I have been hitting up the PS4 to pass the time. I bought my PS4 over a year ago when I lived in Norseman WA. I took a day and drove down to Esperance on the southern WA coast and dropped a bundle of cash for this next gen console. It would mean that on my days off from working at the gold mine in Norseman I would at least have **something** to do other than sleeping and watching regional TV.

Now I decided on the PS4 over the XBone due to one fact: The PlayStation has the Uncharted franchise. The XBone does not. To get an idea of why this matters watch this...


 and maybe this too...



So when it was announced that the PS4 would be getting "Uncharted 4" and XBone wouldn't (not that it ever would have) the choice was clear. So a month ago in May 2016 Uncharted4 was released to the world to much acclaim and HooHaaah. I wrestled with the idea of not getting it because (a) I am unemployed and have no income and (b) I am unemployed and have no income. Then I decided that the whole reason I got the PS4 was for this game and so I was going to get it, and screw the expense.
I went down to my local shopping centre on release day and picked it up from EBgames (price matched to Kmart, because you have to be insane to pay EB prices). I got home and excitedly whipped the disk into the PS4 .. It started loading and informed me that it needed a patch. "Ok", I thought, "cool, not unusual in this day and age". Games regularly come out and have issues that are patched out. This was a 5GB patch though on the first day of release...WOW. To put that in perspective the whole game weighs in at 50GB ... So 10% of it was needing repairs on day 1.
Now it takes my awesome "Australian Capital City" internet about 5hrs to download 5GB so I left it downloading and went and had a nap, went for a drive, drank a coffee, made dinner, ate dinner ... and went to bed because the day was over.

In the morning I was all ready to go play my newly patched and updated Uncharted4. This is where shit got cray-cray. I started the game, it loaded to the main menu. I pressed the X button, chose my difficulty, picked a...


...oh...OK. That had happened maybe once before in the 15 months I'd had the PS4.

I started the game again. Loaded to the main menu, I pressed the X button, chose my difficulty, picked a save slot. The screen went black and a "loading..." screen appeared counting up to 100%. After it reached 100% a quote appeared on the screen....

"I am a Man of Fortune, and I must seek my Fortune."
— Henry Avery, 1694 

Then,
 

and every time since then..

 
That quote is the only thing I have seen in this game so far. It simply does not work at all on my PS4.
I have about 10 other games and every one of them works without exception. Uncharted 4 just doesn't. I went on-line to the developers website and looked in the support forum. This is not a glitch, there where **HUNDREDS** of people with the same problem.

 The dreaded PS4 Error 34878-0 thread..

What the actual fuck??? How did this get released with such a massive problem in it??? I used the interwebs and searched....and searched....and searched for a solution. There isn't one. Not from Sony. Not from Naughty Dog (The developer). Sure there are thousands of people with no problems happily playing the game and commenting on how amazing it is (BASTARDS!!) but there are also hundreds of people who've essentially got a very expensive coaster. So I dug deeper, and while I didn't find a cure (because there isn't one) I did maybe find a cause ....

Here's what I wrote on the support forum at the Naughty Dog website. I will preface this by saying that this is just a hypothesis. It might be wrong, but it has some evidence that supports it. If it is somewhere in the vicinity of the truth then Sony need to have their heads examined because what they are doing to the PS4 is madness.

My post:

After spending a large amount of time researching this error the cause seems to be related to the differences in the consoles hardware. There have already been 2 revisions of the PS4 since the CUH-10XXA model launched in 2013. The first revision is the CUH-11XXA and these are manufactured between mid 2014 and June 2015. After June 2015 the second revision occurred producing the CUH-12XX model. This model has had its memory reworked from 16x512MB RAM chips down to 8x1GB RAM chips. There is also significant changes to the PS4 motherboard (see here: http://goo.gl/nR4XOC )
So now what we see is that there are 3 PS4 models out in the wild and 2 of them have serious issues with this game. The purpose of consoles was to simplify the process for programmers to produce games for a KNOWN and UNCHANGING platform. Sony have seen fit to change the internals of the PS4 and this is the result. Programmers are programming to work on the PS4 CUH-12XX model at unfortunately it seems that this does not guarantee compatibility with the older CUH-10XXA and CUH-11XXA models. My console is a CUH-11XXA and I have not been able to play 1 sec of Uncharted4 so far, It crashes every time in the prologue (or earlier).
I went back through the comments in this thread and the overwhelming majority of people who have the game crashing constantly have a CUH-10XXA or CUH-11XXA model PS4. I couldn't find one person with CUH-12XX console that can't start the game at all.
This puts Naughty Dog in a very unfortunate position. The majority of us here in this thread are screaming blue murder at them for releasing a game that doesn’t work. It *does* work if you have the latest console version but their code for Uncharted4 must have some serious issues when run on the older model PS4s. This could mean that significant amounts of the game code have to be rewritten for compatibility with older hardware which is going to be a MONUMENTAL task for them and is not going to be a quick fix.
If Uncharted4 is just not compatible with the older consoles and it seems this is the case, and If you have a CUH-11XXA PS4 that is still in warranty, Sony have been exchanging them for the newer model. You may get lucky if you contact Sony and explain the situation to them. Everyone else with a launch model CUH-10XXA or the CUH-11XXA are out of warranty and It looks like the only fix we are going to see for those of us with this constant ERROR CE-34878-0 is to buy a newer console made after June 2015.
Unless of course Naughty Dog can fix the issue with a patch. Given the scale and frequency of the crashes I don’t think that is likely :( 

 I await the resolution of this problem. In the meantime I have been playing Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls. THAT GAME IS THE SHIT!!! :D




Monday, May 09, 2016

.....after a short break.

Hey WOW. I had a blog all those moons ago and it's still here??

I thought about starting another one mainly to just vent about stuff that shits me because that's basically all anyone wants to read here anyway.

Looking back at the last entry it was the start of 2010 and I was not having a very good time. Thanks the stars that all changed. Oh, wait. It hasn't. It's now May 2016 and the preceding 6 years have been a mixture of shit, sacrifice, more shit and constant living in a trough of disappointment. In 2010 I actually did get a job. I took it because I had been unemployed for 9 months and needed *something* ANYTHING to have some money coming in. It was a major step backwards career wise after all the good stuff I had done in Melbourne but desperation requires sacrifice. I took a 53% pay cut from my previous job and worked at this job for 3 years until they unceremoniously dumped me. That really hurt, the people who hired me just wouldn't let me progress out of the basement position I was given when I started and I think my constant asking to do something more suitable to my skills eventually got on their nerves. I then spent 18 months unemployed again. Just let that sink in. 18 months with no income.

It was now June 2014 and I was financially ruined and was mere days off losing the house that I bought in 2010. Through friends, I was offered a laboring position at a gold mine out in the middle of the desert in WA. I had to take it, I had no choice. I did this job for 3 months before I was asked to go and run an analytical lab at a different gold mine in a different part of the middle of nowhere, which I accepted. The deal I was offered turned out to be complete bullshit and lies. A trait I found to be typical of the mining industry. The workers are exploited constantly by the management in order to make the most money they can for the owners. They will promise you the Earth and deliver nothing. I really didn't mind the job though. It was not particularly challenging but the people I worked with in the Lab were awesome and will remain lifelong friends due simply to all the crap we had to survive through together. I worked at this job for 15 months. It made me somewhat rich again but at the expense of every other aspect of my life. In short I didn't have any personal life. None. I was stuck at this mine for months on end and got to come home about 4 times over that 15 month period. SO after a series of management mishaps and just plain bad management the mine ran out of money and promptly closed. 95% of the people working there lost their jobs with virtually no notice. I found out on one of my days off, a Friday, and I was packed and GONE by Sunday. That was November 20th 2015.

I have now been unemployed again for another 6 months. I have found that I am now approaching being totally "unemployable". I am not suitable or over qualified for every job I apply for and in the preceding 6 months I have again not had a single positive outcome from any application I have made for a job. This is the norm. This is what being highly skilled and/or educated means in this day and age when you lose your job. It is extremely difficult to get another one and I wouldn't wish this on anyone. It seems though that I have to constantly face this prospect of ridiculously long unemployment and financial hardship. It's just what my life has turned into.